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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25082419">How to Commit a Somewhat Unnecessary Murder in Eight Steps, by Shinomori Aoshi</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/pulsadinura/pseuds/pulsadinura'>pulsadinura</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Rurouni Kenshin</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon? What Canon?, I fix Watsuki's bad plotting so we can disregard all the hackneyed parts of the Hokkaido arc</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 04:03:02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,629</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25082419</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/pulsadinura/pseuds/pulsadinura</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>These are your first ablutions into a new world, where you are alone. You are awake, and death has passed over you and through you.</p>
<p>When you came to it was with a new resolve, however, a come-lately tenant in the great hollow space that yawns within you now.</p>
<p>You’re going to kill Takeda Kanryuu.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>How to Commit a Somewhat Unnecessary Murder in Eight Steps, by Shinomori Aoshi</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>First: dig a grave with your hands. Actually four, but your fingers are shaking and you’re unsteady from the blood loss and you can’t ever seem to get enough air, so they’re more like shallow, interjoined troughs. Scoop those four heads inside, the ones you’ve been carrying by the hair, so heavy, and tamp the earth down over them. You’ve no flowers or offerings you can make, so you simply lay there, curled in the dirt, passing in and out of consciousness, for a long time. You’ve run quite a long way; you only realized how badly it hurt once you stopped.</p>
<p>Second: pull eight bullets from your legs, with your fingers. You do this with your back braced against a tree, biting down on your glove to silence yourself. Each makes a horrible sucking sound as it comes out, and each is like being doused in petroleum and set ablaze from the inside out. The one in your shin is stubborn and will not budge, so it’s a part of you now, after you fought with it and nearly vomited from the pain. You faint; you wake an indeterminate time later doused in sweat, but with a pile of crumpled shells at your side, and clear-headed. You hear water and fall all over yourself to reach it; there’s a trickle of a stream from which you drink, so cold it makes your skull ache, and you kneel in the current and let it whisk your crusted blood downriver. These are your first ablutions into a new world, where you are alone. You are awake, and death has passed over you and through you.</p>
<p>When you came to it was with a new resolve, however, a come-lately tenant in the great hollow space that yawns within you now.</p>
<p>You’re going to kill Takeda Kanryuu.</p>
<p>Reciprocity. A balancing of the scales. In truth, once is not enough; he deserves to be killed four times over. He deserves to have you follow him to hell to kill him again and again for eternity. But once is what you get. Once amounts to forward momentum, so you take it.</p>
<p>Third: get another sword. One is sufficient but two is poetic. Two is proof that you excel at something. To do this, you stagger from the woods and onto the nearest trade road like a ghost, your clothing in tatters. Day laborers and petty merchants swivel their heads. You throw yourself into a rickshaw and instruct its terrified driver to take you to what is now Shizuoka, providing an address in a voice that sounds like dry wood splitting. You have a contact there, one of the splinter groups from the old days, no longer spies so much as historians, the archivists and speculators of the new era. Not many fighters among them anymore, but enough to be useful.</p>
<p>You can’t go home, because to face them would be impossible, so you go there.</p>
<p>The rickshaw driver practically overturns his vehicle to rid himself of you, dumping you in a heap on the curb. He has brought you to a hulking city house that sits wall-to-wall with its neighbors like a row of blackened teeth. From where you are crumpled in the dust you can just reach the doors, so you stay down and rattle them until the whole troupe arrives, rakish and libertine, their midnight blue uniforms intermingled with colors and Western clothing like yours. They haul you up and drag you inside, turning your coat into a stretcher of sorts.</p>
<p>Days, days; they stitch you closed and let you sleep and feed you thin soups that seem rudely overspiced, but perhaps that’s just how ragged you are now. They come and go, some of them wan, some of them owlish, some of them very, very young; some of them skitter across the floorboards and others tromp back and forth like they’re trying to fall through them; some days they are all conspiracy, with hushed talk of wheeling and dealing and gray markets and follow-the-money, while others they are a veritable circus, drinking on the roof and singing songs of old patriots. All the sounds of a life you cannot go back to, but that is so easy to conjure up: Hannya, his arms freshly tattooed and glistening with lanolin; Beshimi nattering to himself as he whittles spiraling threads into dart after dart; Hyottoko and Shikijo dreaming up ridiculous feats of strength, who could rip a tree out of the ground or throw the biggest snowball. That time Hannya needed to break his nose, and made such a fuss about it that Shikijo picked up a whole table and hit him in the face with it, and the blood and the laughter that followed made you feel buoyant and made your mouth twitch involuntarily like it wanted to laugh with them. All that reportioned and exsanguinated now, heads in a shallow grave, bodies likely incinerated in some police furnace, you wallowing a house full of strangers as they traipse about their comfortable little lives. The chasm in you wails with the injustice of it. You yourself are silent, but all day and all night that hollow roils with cruel winds.</p>
<p>Eventually one of them comes to you not with bandages or food, but just herself, one of the original members of the old cohort. She had been useful for fieldwork, owing to a disarming face that should have marked her for success in the entertainment industry were it not for an unsettling hardness in the eyes. This one always seemed cut from the same severe material as you. That is likely the reason she has been sent. Diplomacy.</p>
<p>“Shinomori,” she says coolly, braced for a difficult answer, “where are the others?”</p>
<p>“Dead. Shot. They got me out, they…shielded me.” The words tumble out of you. What happened to them you have not yet called by name. This is the first time, and it stings in your lungs. “I need a second kodachi, and the name of the prison where Takeda Kanryuu is being held.”</p>
<p>“I can see what we have in the storeroom,” she says, “and I’ll consult the others. There’s talk of liquidating the prisons, bringing everyone to Hokkaido for cheap labor. He may be gone, but I’ll let you know what we find.”</p>
<p>You find this acceptable.</p>
<p>“We heard you were working for him at the time of the arrest. If you want my opinion,” she says, and you don’t, but she continues regardless, “if this is revenge, it’s beneath you. I don’t need to tell you how slim the odds are of a sheltered man like that surviving in a prison colony. Why not just let this run its course?”</p>
<p>That you don’t dignify that with a response.</p>
<p>“Because it’s personal to you,” she answers in your stead. “Don’t get too invested. It might make you stupid.”</p>
<p>“You don’t know everything,” you snipe.</p>
<p>She laughs once without smiling, quick and through the nose. “Don’t come to me if you’re wrong.”</p>
<p>Days and days, nameless and dateless; your stitches have dissolved and you’re walking. You waste time by poking through the library, or haunting the kitchen as all the little peacetime spies crow and bicker over big pots of curry. They are withholding information. They see this as a kindness. You rifle through their laid-about notebooks and their dog-eared maps but they have taken care not to write anything down that you can use. They have forced you into the indignity of asking outright, but no, says the one with the perpetually askew glasses, and no, says the one with the strange clip to his diction that might be Dutch in origin, and no, says the one who is always smiling like he is considering telling a secret, but that may just be the set of his face. You’re injured, they all say. They regard you like you yourself are a great exposed wound that they are staunching.</p>
<p>If you were to hurtle from this place, to run until your injuries tore open and frothed, until your legs were reduced to pulp, you couldn’t imagine it feeling like much of anything. Hurt has become a non-concept for you. The hollow sucks it all down, a wind tunnel, replacing it with a blunted determination.</p>
<p>Days. She returns to you in the early dawn, tossing parcel upon you where you lie in your borrowed bed. A sword with no crossguard in a sheath repurposed from a longer blade, and your clothing, some of it mended, some of it new and smelling of attic.</p>
<p>“Closest we have,” she says. “Don’t waste it. Transfer orders have been withheld for Denma-cho Prison. It’s unclear why, because it was slated to be decommissioned. I’d get this done in a week. Any longer and you might miss your window.”</p>
<p>You get yourself in order in a rush, in the silence before the city wakes up. Mismatched swords sheathed end-to-end with some small modifications on your part, building diagram in your pocket, neck gaiter to pull over your nose and mouth in the traditional way. There was no equivalent for your vest or your belts so you leave slightly lighter, a more minimal version of you. The stitching around the hem of your coat is crude.</p>
<p>“Watch for traps,” she says, slouched against the doorpost. “It’s like they’re waiting for you.”</p>
<p>You consider this for the briefest of moments and disregard it. In your confinement your convictions have only grown, possessing you. You carry with you now a hunger that feels no fatigue, that does not wane in the night, that does not offer you other choices, and as such no obstacle can possibly impede you.</p>
<p>Fourth, and forth: cross through the city deep in the night, taking a roundabout path to its heart. Prisons and their onion-layer defenses are simple to breach; each gives you cover from the next. You scale a fence of wooden stakes (which has your legs shaking, but just a little), skirt a moat, and then grapple up the plaster fortifications on the other side. You brace yourself there, your face covered, and gaze into the prison grounds between spikes upon which the severed heads of political prisoners are impaled. There have been a lot of severed heads, these past weeks. You’re just about sick of it.</p>
<p>Before you is a narrow alley, the back of the cell block, filled in with gravel to amplify the scrabbling footfalls of intruders of escapees. At one time, the area at the far end of this building held samurai, and now that the samurai are gone it holds those who are entitled to special concessions. A rich businessman would fit the bill. It’s easier to extort someone when you offer them creature comforts first.</p>
<p>He’s so close; you can practically smell him.</p>
<p>A guard with a lantern paces the alley every eight minutes, his steps crunching in the rocks, and you mark his passage at the midway point again and again. He looks young and walks like he has something to prove, and it’s a shame because you were that boy once, and you can only hope that he’s dimmer-witted than you were.</p>
<p>You vault the fence swift and silent, an owl on the wing. He manages to look up just in time for you to take his head off at the neck. Nothing personal, despite the prescient symbolism; other wounds, which require sufficient blood loss to kill, cause such a commotion, the gasping and the burbling. You catch him beneath the arms as you land, crunching your shoulder against the cell block wall to ease the weight on the shifting stones. When no one comes, you duck under the building dragging his body with you, and reach back out to retrieve the head like a thieving raccoon. Crouched beneath the floorboards, you mark the time on your watch. You now have four minutes until someone notices that the guard’s footsteps have not circled back around.</p>
<p>Fifth: move beneath the floorboards low and elongated, poised on fingertips, and make your way to the cellblock’s far side. The gaps in the wood offer you little more than light and shadow, but that is is all you need: Kanryuu’s cell is liable to have a guard stationed in front of it, and that guard will have a candle. Once you see a murky glow through the slats you move laterally, crablike, passing under the sheer black of a dividing wall. You’re beneath him now, and you can hear him breathing where he sleeps. You shift your weight, positioning your swords in a cramped version of a posture you have only ever read about, but have not practiced.</p>
<p>You surge up through the floor as a whirlwind. In the chaos of airborne debris Kanryuu shrieks and presses himself back against the wall, cornering himself like vermin, and it grates on you the way it has grated on you a hundred times. You are quick to jam a sword into the sliding door’s latch because you have now created an awful racket and someone will have surely noticed it. His scream tapers off into hyperventilation, and then he has the audacity to titter, assuming the arch affectation of the magnate once more.</p>
<p>“Okashira! My old friend. Have you come t—“</p>
<p>Sixth: in a forward lunge, pierce through his ribcage, skewering his heart. When he coughs up an indignant mouthful of blood you twist the blade half a rotation, and he sags against the wall like a half-empty sack of grain.</p>
<p>You have one minute, if you’re being generous.</p>
<p>Somewhere outside, a whistle sounds.</p>
<p>The stillness that follows doesn’t feel like vindication. It doesn’t feel like anything. There is still a place in you that cries out for blood. You realize that perhaps he was never the one you wanted. There is another, and he sleeps in this very city.</p>
<p>In a blur you’re back through the floor, launching yourself over the fences and sprinting through the maze of the backstreets, swords still unsheathed in your haste. You will have him. It will end tonight.</p>
<p>Seven: arrive at the dojo and coax open the lock only to find no signs of life. No hanging laundry, smoldering cookfires. One by one the bedrooms you examine are tidied and empty, the air stagnant. No ambush waits for you in the shadows, and there are no eyes on your back. For the moment you are alone. But this place has a tendency of drawing people in. Someone will show up, you are certain, to set you on the trail again.</p>
<p>Eight: wait.</p>
<p>-</p>
<p>“Liutenant Fujita!” The junior officer yelps, gasping for breath in the doorframe. “Takeda Kanryuu is dead! Requesting permission to dispatch a squadron to Denma-cho Prison at once!”</p>
<p>In a dimly-lit office, Saito Hajime stubs out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. “Murder?” He asks, his expression unchanging.</p>
<p>The boy nods briskly. “That’s right. But the perpetrator escaped before anyone could get eyes on him!”</p>
<p>Saito blinks once and then rises, raising an assuaging palm. “No squadron. I’ll handle this myself. But you can run over there and tell them that they can begin the liquidation process effective immediately.”</p>
<p>“Sir? I-I’m not sure I understand. Does that mean there’s no investigation? Are you not coming too?” the young officer frets as Saito stalks in his direction, making for the door.</p>
<p>“I have other places to be. Now go.” The officer fixes him with a stricken look and then bolts, the papers pinned to the walls fluttering in his wake.</p>
<p>Saito shakes another cigarette loose and strikes a match. “That interesting man…” he says to himself, the catch-light illuminating craggy features set in an obdurate smile, “I know exactly where he’s going next.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I read the infuriating Hokkaido Arc chapter where Kanryuu comes back and had to kill him off. My primary motivator is always spite. </p>
<p>I slightly fudged the prison closure date and its architecture but that’s between us. </p>
<p>The Shizuoka gang is based off a group I work with. I’m in there too, playing a larger role than I reasonably should, but it’s okay to be indulgent sometimes. Aoshi has been a character I have a lot of love for, so expect to see more of him.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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